Learning by Translating

You read right, another post about interpreting.

Last night I dreamt that I was shadowing a simultaneous interpretation from English into Italian! I was doing an actual reformulation, not a mere repetition of words! No, I wasn’t interpreting, just rephrasing what was being said in Italian. Maybe that dream is a reminder: practice.interpreting. I haven’t done interpreting practice in a while, I should catch up with it.

When I practice interpreting, I do it just for fun. I download podcasts and play them using VLC media player (if they’re too fast for my level, this software allows me to “slow them down”… it’s rare to find audio files that are slow enough for beginners like me). I record myself using either Audacity (you can also play the audio file you’re interpreting with it, and listen to the original and the interpreted versions after you’ve finished) or a digital audio recorder (before buying one, I used my cell phone’s audio recorder that allowed me to record up to 5 minutes at a time).

Ways in which I practice interpreting:

• Simultaneous interpreting (I think this is self explanatory enough)
• Consecutive interpreting (you take notes using a spiral-bound notepad and a pen/pencil while the speaker is speaking, then you translate after he/she finished his/her speech. You can’t note every single thing, because you don’t have the time to, and you have to pay a lot of attention to the speech. I noticed that the more I pay attention to taking notes, the more I get distracted. Interpreters must learn to split attention between two activities, and I think this doesn’t apply only to simultaneous interpreting, in which you listen and speak at the same time, but also to consecutive interpreting. Most interpreters use abbreviations or symbols while taking notes)
• Sentence-by-sentence interpreting (a kind of interpreting that is usually done in a liaison interpreting context. First there is the sentence in language A, then you interpret it into language B, then the language B speaker replies to the language A speaker, and you interpret what he said into language A, etc. It is not done simultaneously, but it is rather a form of consecutive interpreting without notes)
• Shadowing (like I wrote at the beginning of the post, it is an exercise in which you reformulate, or repeat, what a speaker says in the same language. You can also do it after a few seconds from the original utterance, trying to lag behind the original speaker as if you’re doing simultaneous interpreting)

(I know, I wrote that I’m more of a written translation person, but I’ve got bitten by the interpreting bug from the very first moment)